


Warp and Weft and Wave

by grainjew



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: Aura - Freeform, Everyone's Sad About Movie 8, Friendship, Gen, abuse of fabric metaphors almost entirely by accident, not enough loyalty content to TAG it as that but definitely enough to make me very soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 19:30:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18666907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: Coda to Diamond & Pearl episodes 71 & 72, “Pokemon Ranger and the Kidnapped Riolu!”After the terror and the excitement of the day, Ash and Riolu take a moment to talk — about Aura, about trust, about friendship.





	Warp and Weft and Wave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallingwish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingwish/gifts).



> please picture me banging on the locked “dropped aura plotline” door and shouting **let me in!!!!! let me in!!!!!**  
>  thank u thats all.
> 
> (or, in other words, connie and i watched movie 8 and then these episodes right after each other, cried a lot, and then my computer promptly went kaput so it took me nearly a full month to finish the fic that came of it)

Ash — and Riolu, in his lap — sat with feet dangling off the edge of a cliff, half a mistake away from a deadly drop but Riolu felt secure.

Everything had calmed down. Officer Jenny had come to take the bad man away, and the nice Ranger had given her a statement, and she'd driven off, and now the whole group was sitting on the ground, waiting for Riolu's guardian to arrive.

Riolu leaned back against Ash's chest until it felt the steady beating of his heart, like safety. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the plateaus of this barren place, and the wind was still.

“I knew a lucario, once,” said Ash, soft enough that only Riolu and Pikachu could hear him. Pikachu made a distressed sound from his shoulder, in response. “Hey, it's alright, Pikachu.”

“Pikapi…” worried Pikachu.

Riolu made an interested noise, because maybe that would explain how Ash knew so much about aura, how Ash could sense it across distances and read Riolu’s memories, how his aura had obviously been used and then disused until it tangled when humans who could use aura were so rare. Even its guardian couldn't; he just knew the theory.

“Yeah,” said Ash, and gestured at nothing, his voice subdued. “It was a year ago now? Bit less, maybe. I dunno.”

“Pi-pikachu,” added Pikachu, fondly.

“Nah, I'm pretty sure it's the time travel that messed me up.”

“Chu pika,” said Pikachu drily, and Riolu, still trying to wrap its mind around the offhand mention of time travel, was suddenly also trying to figure out how someone with access to aura could get lost.

“Sorry, Riolu,” said Ash, and used the hand he'd been waving around to smooth the fur on Riolu's head. “Us arguing even all friendly can't be making your day better, can it?”

Riolu made a noncommittal sound and leaned into Ash's hand. That was _very_ nice. Somehow, he knew all the right places to scratch.

“You're pretty amazing, you know?” said Ash, an awe in his voice like he was watching the sunrise. “I mean, you probably get that all the time, with how cool it is you can use Aura Sphere. But I don't mean just that, cause it was pretty amazing how you could sense me even with how far you were and being turned into a statue! And how strong you were the past few days. _That's_ amazing.”

“ _Ri_ -olu,” said Riolu.

“Nah,” answered Ash, a light laugh in his voice, “I mean, I'm pretty cool, for sure! But you and Pikachu are _way_ cooler.”

“Riolu ri!” insisted Riolu, and projected its memories of Ash rescuing it against the odds, and the relief and admiration it still felt at the thought of him.

Pikachu jumped down off Ash's shoulder to lean its forepaws on Ash's left knee and look Riolu in the face. “Pikapi pi pikachu,” it said, solemnly.

“Hey, quit calling me an idiot!” shouted Ash.

“Pikachuuu,” said Pikachu.

Ash ignored it, and started scratching Riolu again. “I'm glad I could help you, really, but it's just what anyone would have done.”

“Pikachu.” Pikachu rolled its eyes, looking very longsuffering.

Riolu knew a losing battle when it saw one, and had a question to ask, anyways. The sort of important question it would regret not asking, later. So it ignored the byplay between Ash and Pikachu, and tapped Ash's hand to get his attention.

“What is it, Riolu?” asked Ash.

Riolu formed an Aura Sphere in its paw and gestured at Ash. “Riolu?”

“I mean, I don't think I can…” said Ash, and then Pikachu poked him in the knee. “Oh, d'you mean how I can sort of use aura?”

It wasn't hard to tell what Ash was feeling. His emotions were so strong, boiling just under the surface, and his aura the stronger. It was all knotted and tangled from being released once but then never used again, curled back in on itself like yarn to protect him from falls, and Riolu had a sudden urge to take it in its paws and card it back to shape.

But that was the sort of thing a person didn't do without direct permission, so it leaned back into Ash's chest instead and passed a small sphere of its own aura from palm to palm and thought about how the life in Ash's voice had suddenly died.

“Pika…” said Pikachu apprehensively, but Ash put his spare hand on its head and that made it stop and look up at him instead.

“I made a super cool friend, and it taught me lots!” he said, with a brilliant grin Riolu could feel without even looking. His hand froze in the middle of making a pass up over the back of Riolu’s head, for just half a second. “Or… a little, anyways. We didn’t… have time.”

Pikachu murmured in a low tone that Ash meant the lucario he’d mentioned earlier, which Riolu had thought might be the case, but it blinked slowly at Pikachu to let it know it appreciated the clarification. And then it looked up, and saw Ash smiling down at it and Pikachu like he’d seen something precious, all the quiet sadness of him dripping off and _plonk_ ing on the arc of Riolu’s skull, sliding down to its heart, and it understood what Ash meant, too.

“There was this tree, see? This super awesome rock tree called the Tree of Beginning, where lots and lots of pokemon lived.” Ash took his hand off Riolu’s spine to gesture. “An’ then Mew kidnapped Pikachu—”

“Chu,” noted Pikachu dryly.

“—so we had to go find it, but then the tree was dying, or something, and the only way to help it and also Mew, was to put aura in it, so me an’ Lucario did but Lucario didn’t let me finish.” Ash’s hand stopped moving against the backdrop of barren plateau, and then came back to moving over Riolu’s fur like retreating from a battle. “It gets to be with its best friend, finally. So I guess it’s not so bad?”

Riolu was pretty sure it was, in fact, so bad, and Pikachu agreed if the way it darted out from under Ash’s hand and back up to his shoulder was any indication.

“Pi pika, pikachu, pikapi,” it scolded, and there was a rough possessiveness to its voice that left Riolu feeling almost jealous.

“Hey, buddy, I love you too.”

“Pikachu…” muttered Pikachu under its breath, but fondly.

Ash laughed, and took his hand off Riolu to pay attention to Pikachu.

“Rio…” started Riolu, then stopped, because it wasn’t sure if it was interrupting something and also wasn’t much good at condolences and it wasn’t even sure if the conversation was even about that lucario anymore at all. It shut its eyes and leaned back into Ash’s chest, the deep blues of him, all the endless skies and bottomless seas of him, the knotted, tangly warp and weft of the aura of him. “Riolu, lu-ri.”

“Sorry, Riolu,” said Ash, and Pikachu muttered an apology at the same time, even though Riolu wasn’t really sure what they were apologizing about. “We were talking about aura, weren’t we?”

Riolu shrugged, even though shrugging was impolite.

“It’s just,” said Ash, “I dunno anything about aura, other than that. I still dunno really what happened that day with my and Lucario’s aura, and I kinda forgot all about thinking about it ‘cause of all the other things that happened too.” He paused, and when he spoke again, there was a hint of a smile in his voice. “At least, till I met you! Then I was really, really glad, about how I sort of could use aura.”

“Riolu…” said Riolu, its eyes still closed, and then let go a whole long breath when Ash started running fingers through its fur again in a way that made its entire body melt into a pleasant sort of goo. “Luuuuuu.”

“You like that, huh?” murmured Ash, not stopping.

It was very nice. Riolu was very glad he wasn’t stopping, although it was too busy leaning into the touch to say so. And the way Ash’s aura trickled towards his fingers was oddly mesmerizing to watch.

Its paws were twitching towards the tangled mess of it again, until it gave in to the impulse and took a stray strand of Ash’s aura in its palm, opened its eyes, tilted its head a little to the side and a little up to look at Ash. “Ri-lu?” _May I?_

“That feels so weird!” said Ash. Pikachu made a curious noise from his shoulder. Ash’s face made a couple shapes, and Riolu projected its intention extra hard so that Ash would be sure to catch it. Then after a long moment Ash smiled that quiet smile again and Riolu knew that everything would always be alright. “Sure!” he said, and traced a finger down the line of Riolu’s spine. “I dunno what you want to do, but I trust you!”

Riolu felt something blossom, then, on that barren plateau, in the wake of being kidnapped and being terrified and being rescued. And as it started on the careful, precarious work of untangling the neglected mess of current and weave that cloaked such a kind human into shape, it mourned its duty, because in a world where it any choice, it would have stood by Ash and followed him forever— through battle, and through grief, and through any storm that, unbearable alone, blew their way.

But it couldn't, so it picked apart knots of aura with tiny gestures, and tried to pretend that was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> mutters something indistinct about how much i love ash


End file.
